It is known in the art to print data on a web of material and to cure or dry the printed data with a dryer or curer. The webs of material may comprise paper, such as blank paper or pre-printed paper, and may be a web for making adhesive labels, e.g. with a paper based substrate having an adhesive and a side for printing on. One application of such printing art relates to printing codes on product labels, stamps or packaging. The codes may be 1D or 2D bar codes and/or alphanumeric codes. Such codes can be useful in tracing the associated product through a supply and distribution chain, and may also be useful in accounting for tax duty on certain kinds of products such as alcoholic beverages, tobacco products and pharmaceutical products. Additional or alternative printing may be performed on the web of material including patterns and/or security markings. One known type of process is a reel to reel process in which blank web is fed from a source reel to a printer for printing data on the web and subsequently to a dryer or curer for drying or curing the printed data. The printed web is wound about a target reel. It may be necessary to pause feeding the web and printing on the web, which can cause the printed data to suffer in quality and/or web wastage, for reasons explained more fully below with reference to FIGS. 3 to 5.
The present invention has been conceived in the light of such background art, although the technical solutions offered by the present invention are more widely applicable.